People are always coming to me asking for my help designing a solution they’ve already designed. It’s not their fault of course. Project Management software vendors have become very adept at creating marketing materials that make it look easy to deploy an enterprise project management solution “out-of-the-box” so if you find some solution for a particular problem in the marketing literature, it seems an easy decision to make. Take an example I had recently. A…
I’m a child of the 60s. Born in 1958, I was 8 years old when the original Batman TV series came on the air in 1966 and only 10 when it wound up in 1968. It lasted a 120 episodes but the impression it made lasts to this day. In the world of Adam West and Burt Ward who played Batman and Robin, there was a ‘bat’ solution to everything. No matter what the problem,…
Project Management systems – it’s about deployment. Sure, there are lots of functions to consider and everyone wants to know your “methodology” but if you are committed to having projects fit into a an organizational system, it all comes down to deployment. Can you assemble a system that will actually be accepted and used by the end-users who will have to use it. Deployment includes all of it: developing the concept, buying or writing the…
In our last issue I talked about determining your requirements for a corporate project management system. This month we’ll talk about creating your plan for the deployment of your project management system. What?! You don’t have a plan? Well, there’s good news and bad news. The good news is, you’re not alone, many project managers have attempted to deploy their project management system without a plan. The bad news? You’re not alone, many project managers…
So, it’s time to bring it all together. You’ve used your talents thus far to choose the perfect project management software system; to implement it perfectly within your organization and to train your personnel within an inch of their lives. Now, it’s time to fulfill on some of those promises you made to management when they approved the budget in the first place and to integrate the project management system with other systems in the…
Project Portfolio management starts with understanding what’s important to your business.
It’s the hot button lately in project management circles. How can teams collaborate? It’s not idle chatter. It’s been apparent for a long time that a project manager’s role is not just calculating a schedule from his hidden laboratory deep in the bowels of the organization. Now a project manager is expected to spend the vast majority of his or her time working with others. They may be negotiating with the clients or recruiting new…
Dashboards and creating beautiful and shiny indicators of performance are all the rage but how do you ensure that your heat maps, thermometers, speedometers and traffic light icons are showing you what’s useful?
When is a proof of concept a benefit and when is it just more work with nothing to show for it? This article covers some of the basic elements of making proof of concepts work for you.
Matrix Management is good right? Not for everyone. Some organizations are moving away from Matrix Management and back towards Silo management. This article describes why.